The propositional basis of cue-controlled reward seeking

Two experiments examined the role of propositional and automatic (ideomotor) processes in cue-elicited responding for rewarding outcomes (beer and chocolate). In a training phase, participants earned either chocolate or beer points by making one of two button-press responses. Rewards were indicated by the presentation of chocolate and beer pictures. On test, each trial began with a picture of beer or chocolate, or a blank screen, and choice of the beer versus chocolate response was assessed in the presence of these three pictures. Participants tended to choose the beer and chocolate response in the presence of the beer and chocolate pictures, respectively. In Experiment 1, instructions signalling that the pictures did not indicate which response would be rewarded significantly reduced the priming effect. In Experiment 2, instructions indicating that the pictures signified which response would not be rewarded resulted in a reversed priming effect. Finally, in both experiments, the priming effect correlated with self-reported beliefs that the cues signalled which response was more likely to be reinforced. These results suggest that cue-elicited response selection is mediated by a propositional belief regarding the efficacy of the response–outcome relationship, rather than an automatic ideomotor mechanism.     

Multiple context mere exposure: Examining the limits of liking

Recent evidence suggests that increased liking of exposed stimuli—a phenomenon known as the mere exposure effect—is dependent on experiencing the stimuli in the same context at exposure and test. Three experiments extended this work by examining the effect of presenting target stimuli in single and multiple exposure contexts. Target face stimuli were repeatedly paired with nonsense words, which took the role of contexts, across exposure. On test, the mere exposure effect was found only when the target face stimuli were presented with nonsense word cues (contexts) with which they had been repeatedly paired. The mere exposure effect was eliminated when exposure to target face stimuli with the nonsense word cues (contexts) was minimal, despite the overall number of exposures to the target face being equated across single- and multiple-context exposure conditions. The results suggest that familiarity of the relationship between stimuli and their context, not simply familiarity of the stimuli themselves, leads to liking. The finding supports a broader framework, which suggests that liking is partly a function of the consistency between past and present experiences with a target stimulus.     

An Attractor Model of Lexical Conceptual Processing: Simulating Semantic Priming

An attractor network was trained to compute from word form to semantic representations that were based on subject-generated features. The model was driven largely by higher-order semantic structure. The network simulated two recent experiments that employed items included in its training set (McRae and Boisvert, 1998). In Simulation 1, short stimulus onset asynchrony priming was demonstrated for semantically similar items. Simulation 2 reproduced subtle effects obtained by varying degree of similarity. Two predictions from the model were then tested on human subjects. In Simulation 3 and Experiment 1, the items from Simulation 1 were reversed, and both the network and subjects showed minimally different priming effects in the two directions. In Experiment 2, consistent with attractor networks but contrary to a key aspect of hierarchical spreading activation accounts priming was determined by featural similarity rather than shared superordinate category. It is concluded that semantic-similarity priming is due to featural overlap that is a natural consequence of distributed representations of word meaning.     

Divorce mediation: the impact of mediation on the psychological well‐being of children and parents

This study evaluated levels of psychological distress experienced by children (aged 4–16) and parents at the beginning of and one month after mediation for child‐related disputes. In contrast to previous research, this study employed both child‐ and parent‐reports of child outcome. Mediation was associated with reductions in child‐reported, though not parent‐reported, child psychological distress and with reductions in parent‐reports of their own psychological distress. The negotiation of successful agreements in mediation was not related to improved psychological well‐being of family members. The difficulties encountered (i.e. small numbers, low response rate) render the results tentative. Implications of the findings for future research are discussed. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Epistemological Disjunctivism and Introspective Indiscriminability

Philosophia - According to Duncan Pritchard’s Philosophical Issues, 21(1), 434–455, (2011, 2012, 2015)version of epistemological disjunctivism, in paradigm cases of perceptual...     

Market Testing and Market Policing: Illuminating the Fluid micro-Sociology of the Illegal Drug Supply Enterprise in Liquid Modernity

Understanding Scotland’s illegal drug market continues to challenge social scientists. Most evidently neglected are processes related to social supply, from supplier perspectives. When analyzing illegal drug markets, demand-based approaches, customarily sourcing drug users, grossly overlook supplier perspectives. Thus, a qualitative research inquiry interviewing former drug dealers facilitated exploration of a supply-based approach that detailed processes of supply in relation to market level. Situating the findings within the disruptive lens of Chatwin and Potters’ (2014) concept of extending drug use normalization to embrace a dimension of market fluidity to drug supply dealing in Scotland, the researchers interviewed 35 former drug suppliers, learning about drug distribution behavioral patterns. Retail-level dealerships and higher market echelons exemplified an embodiment of the complexity of this social world. Any model aimed at characterizing Scotland’s illegal drugs market must acknowledge and incorporate aspects of social supply (e.g., recreational drugs) and recognize the fluid nature of “normalization,” taking account into its tacit embeddedness in a “local economy” with its own history and distinctive cultural geography. Unless the nuances of these various social formations are acknowledged, the potential of national policing strategies to address the crimes connected with drugs will go unrealized due to their conceptual and pragmatic inadequacies. It is ironic that a commitment to a generalized drug market conception of official enforcement is likely to sow the seeds for an unnecessary criminalization of minor serendipitous offenders and encourage reoffending patterns.     

On Staying in Character: Virtue and the Possibility of Deep Disagreement

The concept of deep disagreement is useful for highlighting skills and resources required for reasons-giving to be effective in restoring cooperative or joint action. It marks a limit. When it is instead understood as a challenge to be overcome by using reasons, it leads to significant practical, theoretical, and moral distortions.

     

On the Psychological Function of Nationalistic “Whitelash”

A noticeable feature of the political discourse accompanying the rise of nationalism in white‐majority countries is that white people fare worse than other ethnic groups in their societies. However, it is unclear based on the extant literature why group‐based relative deprivation (GRD) would correlate with majority‐group nationalism. Here, we propose that the psychological function of nationalism for majority‐group members lies in its ability to assuage the negative feelings arising from GRD. Accordingly, in a New Zealand national probability sample (N = 15,607), we found that GRD among whites was negatively associated with well‐being. However, we also found an opposing indirect association mediated by nationalism. GRD was associated with higher nationalism, which was in turn associated with higher well‐being. These findings suggest that endorsing beliefs about national superiority is one way a nation’s dominant ethnic group can cope with the negative psychological consequences of perceiving that their group is deprived.     

Decision making in the prisoner's dilemma game: The effect of exit on cooperation and social welfare

The prisoner's dilemma game is a mixed‐motive game that offers two players the simultaneous choice between a cooperative and a defective alternative. An often neglected aspect of such a binary‐choice game, however, is that in many real‐life encounters, people can choose not only to cooperate or defect, but they also have a third option: to exit the social dilemma. Although in the literature a consensus has emerged that the addition of an exit opportunity benefits cooperation, there is only scant research into its effect on social welfare. In order to allow a direct comparison of cooperation rates and welfare levels across binary‐choice and trinary‐choice games, in this study, we used a design in which the same participants played similar games with and without an exit option (i.e., a within‐subjects design), and this in a range of structural variations. The findings of our study indicated that the aggregated outcome of both players is generally lower in games with an exit option than in games without an exit option. Moreover, our results showed that the efficiency of the exit option strongly depends on the specific outcome structure of the game (in terms of its endowment size, (a)symmetry, and level of noncorrespondence). In the discussion, it is argued that the implementation of an exit option as a strategy to increase social welfare should be critically assessed.